Thing 7

     For thing 7, I took a look at several class wikis.  My favorites were the Monster Project, Schools in the Past, and the Thousands Project.  I also enjoyed looking at the Study Hall wiki created by CoolCat Teacher's Classes.
     My favorite was the Monster Project.  This wiki pairs students in one class with students in another class of the same grade level but possibly in another school even across the country.  The purpose of this wiki is to develop reading and writing skills while using technology. According to the wiki developers,  Ann Oro, Cranford, NJ and  Anna Baralt, St. Petersburg, FL, "During the project, students create, discuss, describe, interpret, analyze, organize and assess their monsters as well as the monsters of their peers."  The Monster Project is particularly well-organized.  It includes very clear instructions on the welcome and getting started pages.  The project is in its third year.  Each year of the project has its own page with a table listing participating classes with links to the resulting original monsters, descriptions and reproduced drawings.  There are seperate pages by year that provide the students with an opportuinity to reflect on the project and how they may have written their descriptions differently.  Not only is this site well organized it includes additional pages for helpful hints, tips and lesson plans.  I can't thnk of anything that is missing from the Monster Project it is a wonderful example.
    Schools in the Past and  the Thousands Project are similar wikis.  They are each class projects that invite participation from guests around the world.  Schools in the Past started by having students interview their parents and grandparents about their school experiences so that they could compare and contrast schools in the past with those in the present.  The results of these interviews were compiled on a wiki and then guests were invited to add to the lists.  With the Thousands Project, Mr. Monson's Grade 5 Classroom poses a question for a world audience to answer. The goal "is to reach at least one thousand answers for each month of the school year... to share our thoughts, get ideas for writing, learn geography from around the world, collaborate with others and read the thoughts of others."  Both of these sites are less detailed with their instructions inviting participation than the Monster Project but well-done nonetheless.
     The Study Hall is a project of high school students who use the wiki to develop study guides for various courses. It appears from the description of this project that it generated a good bit of enthusiasm when it was started.  However, the project looks to have had no activity since 2006. 
     From my early experience with Wikis, it seems that there are two primary benefits.  The first is as a respository of information that can be accessed from multiple computers by many users.  The second and most beneficial use of Wikis is as a tool for collaboration.  I currently manage one wiki and participate in several others.  The wiki that I manage is a respository for information about the McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth act.  I created this wiki as a source of primary information for all school-based McKinney-Vento program liaisons.  It serves its purpose well.  I am also a participating member on several other school ystem wikis that serve much the same purpose as the McKinney-Vento Wiki.  In my opinion, the best use of a wiki is for collaboration between multiple partners on a common project.  While I can see many additional uses for wikis as respositories of information in my professional role I am still searching for a good use as a collabortive tool.  I believe my next wiki will be a training site for school system personnel responsible for data collections. 

Thing 6

I have been using Diigo for a little while now.  Before this class I had about 9 friends.  I look forward to adding more friends through this class and as I become more comfortable with the social networking aspects of Diigo.  To date, I have really only used Diigo to save, tag and make lists from my bookmarks.  I like how easy it is to keep my bookmarks organized across computers. 

I like the idea of being able to use Diigo to enhance my professional learning ntework.  Although I have not yet had much opportunity to become proficient in searching others bookmarks I like the concept in theory.  I still have much to learn about using all of the social networking features in Diigo.

Thing 5a

After several days of searching for  and reading blogs, I am becoming more enthusiastic about the usefulness of blogs to my professional development.  Locating beneficial blogs is getting a little easier the more practiced I become.  I have found several interesting blog posts on the Blogboard feed.  Blogboard is a compilation of educator blogs from Teacher Magazine.  The blogs and the comments are generally thoughtful and, in my opinion, worthy of discussion.  In fact, I attempted to post my first comment to a blog not created by a classmate in response to a Blogboard blog but was unsuccessful.  I am still disappointed that my comment wasn’t successful because I did not save it and probably can’t generate such a persuasive commentary again.  I would like to two share two nuggets that I found in Blogboad posts.

The first nugget was found in a comment made by Nancy Flanagan to the blog Teacher Assignments? Call Scooby Do!  The blog itself addressed the idea of notifying parents about their child’s teacher assignment prior to the beginning of the school year and posed the question “Can anyone explain why systems don’t seem to have this down to a science? Are there implications in this issue that I am not seeing?”

Lively debate ensued on the pros and cons of sending letters to parents introducing teachers.  Nancy Flanagan shifted the conversation to the “highly qualified” language in NCLB:

Even staunch early proponents of NCLB have lately been admitting that the "highly qualified teacher" language therein was an elevation of credentialing over the substance of excellent teaching. We all want content experts in front of our classrooms, but many teachers who were highly qualified on paper were no such thing in front of children. A school leader who was "serious about building relationships with parents" would trust their own judgment about a teacher's competence, rather than paperwork hoops. It is for that reason that schools--knowing more about teacher's actual abilities and success-- wanted to be very cautious about labeling good teachers "unqualified." And--ironically--vice versa. A law that did nothing to clarify what effective teaching actually is...

It seems to me that far too often we measure what is easy to measure instead of what is important.

The second nugget that I found was also on Blogboard in a post entitled You Lie! In this post Anthony Rebora speaks to the idea of  “confidence-boosting lies” told by teachers to students in order to build the student’s confidence.  The implied question in the blog “is it okay for teachers to tell confidence-boosting lies to students?  I think this is an interesting question deserving dialogue.  I tried to comment on the post myself but so far my comments have not appeared on the blog.  In a nutshell, I posed the question why tell a confidence-boosting lie when a confidence-boosting truth works just as well.